The MKL200 mod is built from zinc alloy with leather and carbon fiber. The dimensions come in at 87mm x 54mm x 27mm, and the box is both portable and lightweight. The large fire button is located at the top and is angled down for effortless firing. Adjacent, there’s a 510 connection bezel that is springloaded for level build or tank installation.

I build a lot of RF circuits, and often it’s convenient to measure and log frequency with a computer.Previously I’ve built standalone frequency counters, frequency counters with a PC interface, and even hacked a classic frequency counter to add USB interface (twice, actually). My latest device uses only 2 microchips to provide a Raspberry Pi with RF frequency measurement capabilities. The RF signal clocks a 32-bit counter SN74LV8154 connected to a 16-bit IO expander MCP23017 accessable to the Raspberry Pi (via I²C) to provide real-time frequency measurements from a python script for $2.30 in components! Well, plus the cost of the Raspberry Pi. All files for this project are on my GitHub page.

The entire circuit is only two microchips! I have a few passives to clean up the RF signal (the RF input is loaded with a 1k resistor to ground, decoupled through a series 100 nF capacitor, and balanced at VCC/2 through a voltage divider of two 47k resistors), but if the measured signal is already a strong square wave they could be omitted. The circuit requires a gate pulse which typically will be 1 pulse per second (1PPS) and can be generated by dividing-down a 32.768kHz oscillator, a spare pin on a microcontroller, a fancy 1PPS time reference, or like in my case a GPS module (Neo-6M) with 1PPS output to provide an extremely accurate gate.

The connections are intuitive! The I2C address is 0x20 when A0, A1, and A2 are grounded. GPB(1-4) control the register select of the counter, and GPA(0-7) reads each bit of the selected register. The whole thing is controlled from Python, but could be trivially written in any language.

An advantage of this continuously running mode is that no clock cycles are lost, so a gate which accidentally fires a bit early due to jitter and cuts-off a cycle will compensate for it on a subsequent read. This is shown above, as a very stable 10MHz frequency reference is measured with this method. A “slow” 1PPS clock tick causes a reading slightly higher, compensated-for by the next reading being slightly lower. In this way, clock sources which are extremely accurate but suffer from low precision (like GPS time sources) are able to maximize the long-term measurement of frequency. Combining this frequency measurement technique with the ability to generate an analog voltage with a Raspberry Pi will allow me to perform some interesting experiments with a voltage controlled crystal oscillator.